The Bible and Purgatory #2

Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello again, I'm Bill Wright. It is our joy to continue our commitment to teaching God's people God's Word. Today Don is continuing with the second part of a message we started last time.

So let's get right to it. Open your Bible as we join Don now in the Truth Pulpit. R.C. Sproul says this. For those of you not familiar with his name, R.C.

Sproul is one of the good guys, so you know how to receive the quote I'm about to give you. He says... ...weeps at this notion. The issue in the indulgences controversy is the sufficiency of Christ alone to redeem a person. According to Protestantism, justification happens on the basis of Christ's merit credited to his people. For Rome, we are never finally saved until we have sufficient merit of our own.

End quote. Now, think with me a little further. Even within their own system, the church asserts the fact that it has jurisdiction over an infinite treasury of merit that can reduce the punishment that the faithful experience for their sins.

That's what they say. They say there is this treasury, which there is no such thing. The only merit is the merit of Christ.

But let's assume what they say for the sake of argument. We have this treasury, and we as the church have the authority over that treasury. That's our account. It belongs to us, and we have the authority to reduce the punishment that the faithful face for their sins.

But you know what? They won't just give it to you. You have to work for it. You have to come sometimes literally crawling on your knees saying, please help me! Please give me something that would reduce the punishment that still remains for my sin because, you know, Jesus didn't pay it all.

And you come crawling to the Catholic Church asking them to please give you something that could reduce your debt, and they say go and do this and we'll give you an indulgence. Why? Why? If Jesus Christ could leave the glories of heaven and gladly, freely give up his life on the cross and shed his blood as a gracious act of mercy for sinners of his own initiative, why?

Why? Won't the Catholic Church, who is supposedly his representative on earth, why won't the Pope just freely do that for everyone that attains to and looks to the Catholic Church for salvation? Why wouldn't you just do it freely like Christ did? Christ said, freely receive, freely give. Church says, ain't gonna do it that way.

We got it all, but you gotta crawl first. I detest that. The treasury of merit is completely unbiblical. The idea that some saints had more merit than they needed and can share it with others is bizarre and it is untrue. There is nothing biblical about it.

That would be bad enough. But you know what really steams my broccoli on this? You know what really invokes what I trust is completely righteous anger on this? This utterly distorts the character of our gracious God. This whole system pictures God as someone who has to be poked and prodded to meagerly give out in little itty bitty increments forgiveness and release from the punishment of our sins. Yeah, Christ did it, but you know what?

I'm going to require several pounds of flesh from you in addition to that. That is such a slander against the true God of the Bible. Look at Ephesians chapter 2. Set the Catholic system of indulgences over against the truth of what God did for you in your salvation.

They got God as a miser and the Catholic Church as a miser over their treasury of merit and they just dole it out in bits and pieces. What's the truth? That's what we ought to want to know. What's God really like? Ephesians chapter 2 verse 4. When you were dead and your trespasses and sin, what did the real God, the true God, the God of the Bible, when he saved you, what was it like?

And what did it display and reveal about his character? Chapter 2 verse 4. But God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. So that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. What's God really like? He's a God of boundless grace, rich in mercy, full of love and kindness toward unworthy sinners like you and me.

That's what he's really like. That's why at other times when we realize our guilt and we realize the freeness of salvation, we realize the fact that God has given us a gift that we never could have deserved at the price of the blood of his own son. That's why we sing amazing grace.

How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. We get so familiar with the hymns that we forget the magnitude of what they're saying. This is grace, unbounding undeserved favor, so complete, so rich, so magnificent that the tongue just runs out of words to describe it, but we can say, oh, it's amazing.

That grace that forgave me is amazing. That's who God really is. And the system of indulgences takes this infinitely wonderful portrait of God and throws black paint all over it and smears it and disfigures it till he's lost in the process. That is the ultimate crime of Roman Catholicism.

That is the ultimate crime, the treason of cosmic proportions is that it makes God out to be someone other than who he is. And the accountability of the cardinals, of the popes throughout the ages that have promulgated this is of infinite fearsome proportions. That they have misrepresented who God really is and they have led sinners blindly following their teaching.

The blind have led the blind and they both end up in the pit. But the teachers, the promulgators of this demonic doctrine are going to face a stricter judgment as a result. Ultimately, this whole system of indulgences denies the finished work of Christ. For one more passage to kind of cleanse our palate, to remind us of what the truth is, turn to Hebrews chapter 10, beginning in verse 14. Hebrews 10 verse 14. Speaking of our Lord Jesus Christ, it says, For by one offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. One offering, all time, there's no punishment left to pay. And the Holy Spirit also testifies to us for after saying, This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord.

I will put my laws upon their heart and on their mind I will write them. He then says, watch it, verse 17, and their sins and their lawless deeds I will remember no more. Now where there is forgiveness of these things, there is no longer any offering for sin. The Bible says when God forgives you in Christ, the forgiveness is complete and there's no punishment left to pay. God does not remember your sins by which it means that he no longer will hold them against you. There's no more punishment to pay. And because that's true, there's nothing left to do to try to remit any kind of payment for your sins, to make any kind of payment for it. If you've been forgiven, there's no longer any offering for sin, it's done, it's over, it's paid because Jesus paid it all. The Catholic system of indulgences gets out the broadest sharpie marker it can find and makes a big X over that passage of Scripture.

Not in our system it doesn't. Let's consider a second point. Just briefly, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. Beloved, there's a sense in which if you have a little sense of feeling as we've gone through this over the past few weeks, as we have gone through it here tonight and looked deep into a demonic pit, if there's a sense of weariness and fatigue that you feel on this, I sympathize, I feel that way too.

In some sense, in part I feel that way. But let's step back and just put everything in perspective here. What the Catholics have said as we've reviewed it over these past several weeks, you would think that a religious system that required baptism for the forgiveness of sins and seven sacraments for the forgiveness of sins and a system of mass bowing down before a wafer as if it was the living God and prayers to Mary and indulgences, you would think that at some point they would say, okay, that's enough. You'd think that they'd say, you know what, we've just piled brick upon brick upon brick, pallet upon pallet of bricks upon the souls of these people. Why don't we just back off and let that be enough? If they do that much, surely we can let them into heaven when they die.

No. No, they're not done. They're not done cracking the whip on their slaves. They're not done inflicting punishment even then. Even faithful Catholics have another stage to face after they've been trying to pull that sled of multiple pallets of bricks behind them on dry ground and having it wrapped around their neck and just trying to strain to get that thing to move a couple of inches toward righteousness.

And they fall over from exhaustion and they die. What does a Catholic have to face then? Purgatory. What is purgatory? It's a place after death, it's a further dungeon of punishment for them.

This is incredibly sad. Think about the 1.27 billion people, that this is what they think is truth. Here's what the Catholic Church says about purgatory at paragraph 1030 in their catechism. All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation.

See, that sounds great, doesn't it? Oh, thank goodness, I'm assured of eternal salvation. And they held it out with one hand and say, you're assured of your eternal salvation. But you know what they immediately do?

They don't even finish the sentence before their other hand comes and takes it away. After the semicolon, they say, but... Let me repeat it. All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation, semicolon, but... What do you mean, but? But after death, they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

Paragraph 1031. The church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect. The tradition of the church, by reference to certain texts of scripture, speaks of a cleansing fire. As for certain lesser faults, we must believe that, before the final judgment, there is a purifying fire.

That's their gospel. We're going to give you a weight of works that you can never satisfy. You will still feel guilt.

You will never know if you're fully forgiven or not. And when you die, what we tell you is, is that purgatory is on the other side. It just makes me weep.

If my eyes were expressing what's in my heart, a river of tears would be coming down right now. James McCarthy, a Protestant writer, one of the good guys, says this. And I quote, Roman Catholic theologians are not in agreement as to the nature of suffering in purgatory. Some teach that the pain of purgatory is chiefly a sense of loss and being separated from God. Others teach that souls in purgatory suffer intense and excruciating pain from fire. McCarthy goes on to say, how long a person must suffer in purgatory is not clear. For not only must the Catholic pay for his sins, but his soul must be cleansed after death by cleansing pains.

The amount of time required to perform this soul scrubbing varies from one person to the next. End quote. To which we say, to which the Bible says, no, absolutely not. For the believer, Jesus Christ made a perfect sacrifice. His blood, scripture says, cleanses us from all sin.

When you put your faith in Christ, there was a perfect cleansing that took place on your account before God, that cleansed all of your sin and removed all of the guilt and satisfied all of the punishment that God would ever require. That is why Christ suffered on the cross, was that as the God-man, he was able to absorb an infinite amount of punishment for everyone who would ever believe in him. That's why he suffered. That's why he groaned on the tree. He did it for you. He did it out of grace.

He did it so there would be nothing left to pay. And scripture says, 1 John 1.7, the blood of Jesus, his son, cleanses us from all sin. You know what that means? There's no purification left to be done. Oh, we're being sanctified in this life, but that has nothing to do with the paying of punishment for our sin. Listen, and again, coming back to what we said about the doctrine of justification by faith alone, that God counts to us, reckons to our account, credits to us the perfect righteousness of Christ, pardons all of our sins.

Beloved, let me ask you a question. If that's true, and it is, how could we ever say that a true believer had only been imperfectly purified, as the Catholics say? The very language they use denies the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, because they tell you there's still a lot of work to do and you better get to it. And even when you've done it all, there's more to pay when you're done.

There's more to pay when you die. Purgatory is not in the Bible. There is no need for it in Christian salvation. So, baptisms, seven sacraments, Mass, Mary, indulgences, purgatory.

They may frame their system at times as an expression of God's grace. But beloved, listen to what they say, and in the end it is obvious there is a lot for a man to do to be saved in the Catholic system. And even then there's no assurance that he'll ultimately end up in heaven in the end. Friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, that is not biblical salvation.

That is a man-made invention that has no power to save anyone from their sins. What does Scripture say? Listen as I read a few verses as we start to wind this down. Acts 16 31, believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. Romans 11 6, if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace.

Galatians 2 16, by the works of the law, no flesh will be justified. Hebrews 1 3, when he had made purification of sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. Revelation 1 5, to him who loves us and released us from our sins by his blood. If you trust Christ alone for salvation, my friends, he releases you forever from any punishment for sin. And let me tell you, he's glad to do it.

He doesn't do it begrudgingly. Scripture says that there's more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than 99 righteous men who need no repentance. Heaven rejoices in the forgiveness of sin. God does it gladly, abundantly, freely as an act of grace. And that's why that's why we say it's to God alone be the glory. That's why scripture says, therefore, no man can boast. The entire Catholic system denies all of that. These two things are mutually exclusive.

Beloved, mark it clearly in your mind so that you never forget and that you never go back and you have a clear sense of discernment anytime anyone says anything different than this. Roman Catholicism is not Christian. They teach a different gospel that is under the curse of God. So, recognizing that we have a final postscript message coming on Sunday from James chapter two. What have we done in this series titled The Bible and Roman Catholicism?

From scripture, by the grace of God, we have shown the utter impossibility of Catholic assertions about the pope, Catholic tradition, mass, Mary, Catholic salvation, indulgences, and purgatory. Beloved, I'll be honest with you. We've not at all said all that we could have said in this series. Truth be told, we have not said all that we probably should say in this series. But beloved, we've said more than enough to support these conclusions that I'm about to make. Ian Murray writes, instead of upholding the New Testament gospel, the Roman system is calculated to lead away from faith in Christ to faith in church and faith in the priest.

Lorraine Bettner concluded his classic work with this final paragraph. On page 460, he says this, and I quote, The admonition of scripture is, quote, by their fruits you shall know them. Surely the fruits of Romanism as they have been manifested throughout history and in various parts of the world are sufficient to disprove its arrogant claim that it is the only true church. Its interpretation of the scriptures is so erroneous and its practices so persistently unchristian that over the long period of time its influence for good is outweighed by its influence for evil. Then Bettner concludes with these words, it must therefore as a system be judged to be a false church, end quote. The pulpit of Truth Community Church.

Truth Community Church itself is in full and unqualified agreement with those assessments from Ian Murray and Lorraine Bettner. We close with our prayer that God would open eyes so that many would turn from Catholicism and find true salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, based on the scriptures alone, to the glory of God alone. Father, may it thus be in the name of Christ we pray.

Amen. That's Don Green here on The Truth Pulpit. And here's Don again with some closing thoughts. Well, my friend, before we go after today's broadcast, I just want to invite you to look me up on Facebook. Don Green on Facebook.

I often make original posts. I make comments about ministry and other matters of biblical importance there that do not make their way into this broadcast. And so if you are on Facebook, I invite you to join me. Look for Don Green and join us on Facebook for another way to connect with our ministry. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.